Taxpayers have been clobbered with a £7.5 million bill to pay social care agency workers in Cambridgeshire since 2015 despite record numbers of redundancies in recent years and massive cuts to the care budget.

And some agency workers are being paid more than double the rate regular staff receive for the same job, it has been revealed.

The revelations about payments to agency workers by the council comes amid councillors fear local services could be “decimated” as the county authority prepares to cut up to 115 jobs in the coming year.

In 2015 it was announced public services in Cambridgeshire faced cuts of £120 million over the next five years.

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The biggest reduction was expected to fall on the council’s care budget, which might lose around £10 million.

But despite this the total expenditure by the council on agency workers from 2015 to March 2016 was £2,098,000 on children’s social care and £2,284,897 on adult social care.

From April to December last year a total of £1,558,555 was spent on children’s social care agency workers and £1,774,947 on adult social care agency workers from April, 2016 to the end of January this year.

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Examples of the massive gulf in wages between salaried staff and agency workers has also been revealed.

A consultant social worker employed through an agency was paid £33-£35 per hour while a salaried staff member earned a maximum of £23.35 per hour.

The difference in pay for a child protection chair was £38 an hour compared to £23.35 an hour maximum and for a family intervention partnership worker it was £30 compared to a maximum of £14.05 an hour for a salaried staff.

A group manager employed through an agency gets £44.85 an hour while a permanent staff member would get £26.49 maximum for the same job.

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A county council spokesman said: “Cambridgeshire remains a challenging place for recruitment for social care workers, which means we do have to use agency staff to make sure vulnerable people in our communities receive the right support.

“However, we are taking steps to reduce agency costs, which include recruitment campaigns and ensuring the rates we pay our staff are in line with the regional average. By doing this we hope to have more directly employed social care staff, which will mean greater consistency in the support people receive as well as lowering agency costs.”